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Another streaming player? That's right, the Netgear NeoTV NTV200 may just be another streaming player, but they aren't all created equal. Netgear selected to leave out local content streaming on this product to focus on the experience and it clearly shows with the intuitive user interface.Next Page »

The article sites the inspiration from it's tablet email interface, but I notice that it looks a lot like Outlook, Thunderbird, or just about any other desktop email client. I happen to like the feature and have already turned it on.

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Preview Pane, which is now available in Gmail Labs, allows users to simultaneously preview parts of an email while reading or replying to others. Users of Gmail for iPad or Android will instantly recognize the interface — its design is directly inspired by the email service’s mobile web apps.

This is Mozillas first release since they've adopted a six week release cycle. Hopefully, speed doesn't sacrifice quality.

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Mozilla delivered two things today: Firefox 5 for personal computers and Android phones, and the promise to deliver the browser just a few months after its predecessor.

The organization, once the leading challenger to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, faces new challenges--notably Google's Chrome, new versions of which arrive every 6 weeks. Adopting a similar philosophy, Firefox now revs on a three-month cycle, and today Mozilla met its first deadline.

Is Comcast for real? I don't know anyone that has Comcast who likes Comcast. I wouldn't buy another thing from them if I could help it. I guess they're reaching for another source of revenue since they cause their customers to run screaming to someone else.

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The company plans to announce tomorrow that it's expanding its Xfinity Home Security service. Last year the company began testing the service in Houston. Now it's adding six more cities. Additional cities that will get the new service include parts of Philadelphia; Portland, Ore.; Jacksonville, Fla.; Sarasota/Naples, Fla.; Chattanooga, Tenn.; and Nashville.

The Xfinity Home Security service offers traditional home security features, such as police and fire alarm protection with 24-hour monitoring. It also offers some home automation functions, such as the ability to adjust thermostats and lights remotely. And when people are not home, they can also watch live video streams from wireless cameras that are positioned in and around their home.

The technology behind the system is slightly different from traditional home security systems from companies, such as ADT. The Comcast Xfinity Home Security system works over a broadband connection rather than a phone connection. And as a result it's able to offer the video service and remote management. The company uses cellular networks as a back up to the broadband connectivity to ensure uptime.

Do you like someone on Facebook? I mean, like like, not just like... You know, stalker like. You don't have to worry anymore about constantly checking the target's profile. You can now be informed when the target is single again and pounce.

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When it comes to love, timing is everything. The same holds for sex, too. So the Breakup Notifier's eagle eyes and instant digits could help you ensnare the love of your life. Or at least your week.

Yes, it does feel a little like stalking. But in a good way. You don't want to miss your chance. Surely, all is fair in love and war. And, when it comes to love, it's always a war.

According to the New York Daily News, Loewenhertz created the app after he eavesdropped on a chat between his fiancee and her mother.

This is not always a wise thing to do. However, in this case, it was his fiancee's sister who needed a date, and, like fine members of the family, mother and sister wondered who might be available to fill that void.

Loewenhertz asked, jokingly of course, whether she'd like to know when he might become available. And one of the world's great ideas was born.

At the moment, the app is free. But it surely won't be for long. With love, you always have to pay.

I really think we're screwed as a society when stuff like this happens. Well, maybe not just this.

And the internet will already be using HTML5 for some time before that. The HTML5 final release will be in 2014 and WHATWG wants to move to versionless living specifications. That doesn't work.

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Likely by the end of 2011, the W3C will issue a second last-call version and begin a second round of refinements.

In the second quarter of 2012, a new phase begins, in which "implementors" of the specification--browser makers, essentially--provide feedback. During this phase, the W3C concentrates on a suite of thousands of tests to see if implementations of HTML5 really do get the same results when interpreting a Web page's code.

The culmination of this phase is a "candidate recommendation" of the HTML5 spec and at least two "interoperable implementations"--in other words, two different browsers that produce the same results on the test cases. The implementors' feedback is scheduled for completion by the first quarter of 2014.

IANA has assigned 2 more /8 blocks to APNIC, the Asia-Pacific IP number people. This should trigger the last remaining five blocks to be handed to other RIRs. Those will hand IPs downstream to smaller entities. While we may be nearly out of assignable blocks, there are many IPs that are dark and unused. Does the Post Office need a /8? I don't think so.

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It's hard to predict how long it will be before these eventual customers of IPv4 addresses will be unable to get them easily.

"The rate of further regional assignment will depend on regional demand, which is accelerating faster in some parts of the world (Asia/Pacific) than others (Africa)," said Alain Durand, director of software engineering at network equipment maker Juniper Networks. "Some service providers may exhaust their IPv4 addresses within 3 to 6 months, while others will exhaust them perhaps over a longer period, depending on the rate at which they are allocated."

It seems that the bill that would allow the President to selectively disable internet services to parties is coming back in the new Congress. Let's see if the new Republican majority in the house would allow a vote on it considering their rule that a bill must be grounded in the Constitution. The fact that this bill is even proposed is terrible. You can't give a single person (the President) the power to block communications. There is no judicial review! And what's to stop the government from declaring dissenting political views are illegal and block every single site they don't agree with. What are we now? China?

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The revised version includes new language saying that the federal government's designation of vital Internet or other computer systems "shall not be subject to judicial review." Another addition expanded the definition of critical infrastructure to include "provider of information technology," and a third authorized the submission of "classified" reports on security vulnerabilities. ...

Lieberman, who recently announced he would not seek re-election in 2012, said last year that enactment of his bill needed to be a top congressional priority. "For all of its 'user-friendly' allure, the Internet can also be a dangerous place with electronic pipelines that run directly into everything from our personal bank accounts to key infrastructure to government and industrial secrets," he said.

Civil libertarians and some industry representatives have repeatedly raised concerns about the various proposals to give the executive branch such broad emergency power. On the other hand, as Lieberman and Collins have highlighted before, some companies, including Microsoft, Verizon, and EMC Corporation, have said positive things about the initial version of the bill.

But last month's rewrite that bans courts from reviewing executive branch decrees has given companies new reason to worry. "Judicial review is our main concern," said Steve DelBianco, director of the NetChoice coalition, which includes eBay, Oracle, Verisign, and Yahoo as members. "A designation of critical information infrastructure brings with it huge obligations for upgrades and compliance."

In some cases, DelBianco said, a company may have a "good-faith disagreement" with the government's ruling and would want to seek court review. "The country we're seeking to protect is a country that respects the right of any individual to have their day in court," he said. "Yet this bill would deny that day in court to the owner of infrastructure."

Starbucks is trying to reduce the burden of credit card payments (CC companies take a big chunk of small sales) by encouraging the use of gift cards and this new payment system. If it works, this might be a big deal for payments of the future. I just can't see using a device that may lose internet access when you're trying to pay and you're out of luck.

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Here's how it works. Simply take any Starbucks gift card you've ever received - or get a new one at any Starbucks store - and then register that card online. That card then becomes your primary source of payment for all your Starbucks transactions. Online, you can use a credit card to refill your Starbucks card. You can even have it set to auto-refill after it dips below a certain amount. Then, download the Starbucks iPhone app. When you go to your neighborhood Starbucks, simply load the app, click "touch to pay," and then scan the phone at a custom scanner at the register. The purchase will be deducted from your Starbucks gift card.

And all of that value comes from YOU. That's right, you. Every piece of data you put on Facebook makes their value that much more. They can mine the data for trends and such to sell to advertisers and more.

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Facebook has raised 500 million euros from US investment bank Goldman Sachs and a Russian investor that values the popular social networking site at 50 billion dollars, the New York Times reported on Monday.

The investment puts the value of Facebook at higher than fellow Internet companies eBay and Yahoo!, as well as media company Time Warner, the newspaper said citing sources familiar with the deal.

The funds will give Facebook added resources to develop new resources, make acquisitions and lure away top employees as it increasingly competes more directly with Internet search giant Google.

Wow, the International Telecommunications Union latest statistics shows that in the last five years, the internet users has doubled! And by the end of 2010 internet users will surpass the 2 billion mark........Now that is a lot of internet users. And we all thought that Wal-Mart was crowded :-)

Here is a small blurb from the International Telecommunication Unions official site:

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Geneva, 19 October 2010 — ITU’s latest statistics published today in The World in 2010: ICT facts and figures reveal that the number of Internet users worldwide doubled in the past five years and will surpass the two billion mark in 2010. The number of people having access to the Internet at home has increased from 1.4 billion in 2009 to almost 1.6 billion in 2010. The new data were released on the eve of World Statistics Day, which will be celebrated worldwide on 20 October 2010.

162 million of the 226 million new Internet users in 2010 will be from developing countries, where Internet users grow at a higher rate. By the end of 2010, 71% of the population in developed countries will be online compared to 21% of the population in developing countries. While in developed countries 65% of people have access to the Internet at home, this is the case for only 13.5% of people in developing countries where Internet access in schools, at work and public locations is critical. Regional differences are significant: 65% of Europeans are on the Internet, compared to only 9.6% of Africans.

With the rapidly increasing high-bandwidth content and applications on the Internet, there is a growing demand for higher-speed broadband connections.

ITU considers broadband as a catalyst for growth. Recently, ITU and UNESCO launched the Broadband Commission for Digital Development that aims to promote the adoption of broadband-friendly practices and policies worldwide. ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré says, “Broadband is the next tipping point, the next truly transformational technology. It can generate jobs, drive growth and productivity, and underpin long-term economic competitiveness. It is also the most powerful tool that we have at our disposal in our race to meet the Millennium Development Goals, the deadline for which is now just five years away.”

To read this full article, jump on over to the official ITU site and give a thorough look.

According to TorrentFreak, many different torrent sites crashed on Saturday due to a hack to the Master Boot Records (MBR's) on many of the host servers. This caused many torrent users to seek other torrent sites for several hours due to the downtime. The host, Reality Check, made some comments to TorrentFreak regarding this issue.

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“We are writing this letter to inform you that a very targeted malicious attack took place on our network this morning at 6AM EST. As a result, most of our server operating systems have been corrupted resulting in the current downtime,” the company wrote to the affected customers a few hours ago.

“We have access to all backups and have already figured out a strategy for bringing your servers back up, and have all hands on deck working to restore service,” Reality Check Network President Moisey Uretsky added.

Now interesting enough, they were unsure at first who was responsible for the large scale hack, and had a hunch that it was an anti-piracy organization, but found out later that it was a disgruntled ex-employee as stated here:

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“It was the result of an ex-employee who was with us for three years as a result he had intimate knowledge of our systems which is why the effects are so large,” Uretsky wrote.

According to some news, Best Buy has started selling the new Sony Internet TV as of the 17th of October! You can jump over to Gizmodo and take a quick look, as they have a great deal of pictures to take a look at.

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Earlier this morning rumor had it that Best Buy was getting—and selling—the new Sony Internet TVs as early as today. An anonymous tipster sent us some pics confirming that this could indeed be the case.

Google has released a new image format for the web. It is called "WebP" and it originates from the WebM video codec. It also looks worse than JPG images in the examples. I guess they need to work on the encoder a bit more.

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As part of Google’s initiative to make the web faster, over the past few months we have released a number of tools to help site owners speed up their websites. We launched the Page Speed Firefox extension to evaluate the performance of web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them, we introduced the Speed Tracer Chrome extension to help identify and fix performance problems in web applications, and we released a set of closure tools to help build rich web applications with fully optimized JavaScript code. While these tools have been incredibly successful in helping developers optimize their sites, as we’ve evaluated our progress, we continue to notice a single component of web pages is consistently responsible for the majority of the latency on pages across the web: images.

Most of the common image formats on the web today were established over a decade ago and are based on technology from around that time. Some engineers at Google decided to figure out if there was a way to further compress lossy images like JPEG to make them load faster, while still preserving quality and resolution. As part of this effort, we are releasing a developer preview of a new image format, WebP, that promises to significantly reduce the byte size of photos on the web, allowing web sites to load faster than before.

If I had to guess, I would suspect this would be a push to incorporate WebP decoders into smartphones and such to allow faster browsing... When that happens, Google's WebM video codec has an easy entry since the frames can be decoded by the WebP decoding hardware. Win-win for Google.

NBC is adding more content to Netflix streaming service. In a few years, we'll all get a single internet connection with no other added services (like phone or TV). Everything will be done over IP. It actually is right now, but you are being charged for the service provided at an exceptional rate. Even I'm doing that as well, though.

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Under the new arrangement, "hundreds" of "Saturday Night Live" episodes from the past 35 years, as well as "day-after broadcast" of the show's next three seasons, will be available on Netflix Instant Streaming. NBC is also offering every previous-season episode of "30 Rock," "The Office," and "Law & Order: SVU." Earlier seasons of those shows already on Netflix will still be available. All episodes of the venerable SyFy series "Battlestar Galactica" will also be available on the service. NBC Universal and Netflix said that "Monk" and "Friday Night Lights," among many other shows, will also be included in the expanded relationship between the companies.

Adobe has just updated their player to support x86-64, natively, on Linux (and Mac/Windows). This player still does not support any sort of additional hardware rendering that is present on the Windows and Mac builds. If you don't want to use Adobe's Flash, you can try Lightspark.

The WD TV Live Plus has some great features over the original Netflix only players. While the Roku maybe well known for its Netflix streaming support, the WD TV Live Plus has Netflix and more. Combine tons of internet content with support for your internal network content and you've got a product ready to be at the center of your media needs.Next Page »

I don't hide the fact that I'm a libertarian and one of the tenets of that is to uphold personal freedoms and have a limited federal government. The Federal Government wants to intrude on one of the most basic rights that we are given when we are created, the ability to speak freely and openly; I mean, on the internet. The government wants power to oversee areas of the internet and wants to be able to control certain aspects.

Let's look at their comments.

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In the physical world, I associate the dynamics of a natural ecosystem with two important concepts: first, the presence of some set of biological laws such as natural selection, that second, leads to a balance or equilibrium state so that even when there is a disturbance these natural operations and laws bring the ecosystem back to a equilibrium state (maybe different than before, but an equilibrium).

Applying this concept to the online ecosystem could lead us to accept the idea that the Internet is self-regulating and there is some natural order that will always emerge no matter how the system may be disturbed. From this concept some argue that policymakers should just leave the Internet alone.

In fact, "leaving the Internet alone" has been the nation’s Internet policy since the Internet was first commercialized in the mid-1990s. The primary government imperative then was just to get out of the way to encourage its growth. And the policy set forth in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was: "to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation."

This was the right policy for the United States in the early stages of the Internet, and the right message to send to the rest of the world. But that was then and this is now.

That was then and this is now? What changed? You don't think that the internet has become a medium to allow political views to be disseminated to large audiences of like minded people would be the cause? No... Couldn't be. My question to you, why is it when something works does the Federal Government want to regulate it?

What's the purpose of the Federal Government regulating the internet? This is what the document says are problems.

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If users do not trust that their credit card numbers and private information are safe on the Internet, they won’t use it.

If content providers do not trust that their content will be protected, they will threaten to stop putting it online.

If large enterprises don’t have confidence that their network will not be breached over the Internet, they will disconnect their network and limit access to business partners and customers.

If foreign governments do not trust the Internet governance systems, they will threaten to balkanize the Domain Name System which will jeopardize the worldwide reach of the Internet.

People won't buy stuff on the internet? Please, what are the Feds looking at? The next three are FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) trying to evoke a emotional knee-jerk reaction. All the points are unfounded and even if they were, government needs to stay out and let the internet manage itself as it has done for a long time.

What are the goals of this new policy?

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Privacy policy. Here’s the question: How can we enable the development of innovative new services and applications that will make intensive use of personal information but at same time protect users against harm and unwanted intrusion into their privacy? We are launching a series of listening sessions this spring with industry, advocates and academics in the field, and will follow up with a notice of inquiry and public outreach events.

Child protection and Freedom of Expression: As more children go online, how do we ensure proper targeting of law enforcement resources against serious crime while remembering that most important line of defense against harmful content is the well- informed and engaged parent or teacher? Later this year, the Online Safety Technology Working Group, created by Congress and convened by NTIA, will issue a report on the state of the art in child protection strategies online.

Cybersecurity: How do we meet the security challenge posed by the global Internet which will require increased law enforcement and private sector technology innovation yet respect citizen privacy and protect civil liberties. We’re participating in a Commerce Department cybersecurity initiative that will address these issues, particularly as they relate to improving the preparedness of industry for cyber attacks.

Copyright protection: How do we protect against illegal piracy of copyrighted works and intellectual property on the Internet while preserving the rights of users to access lawful content? NTIA and our sister agency at the Department of Commerce, the US Patent and Trademark Office, are beginning a comprehensive consultation process that will help the Administration develop a forward-looking set of policies to address online copyright infringement in a balanced, Internet-savvy manner.

Internet Governance: In our role administering the Federal government’s relationship with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), how do we ensure that ICANN serves the public interest and conducts its activities with the openness and transparency that the global Internet community demands? Last fall, NTIA and ICANN set forth a framework for technical coordination of the naming and numbering system and I am looking forward to soon participating in the first of the administrative reviews to ensure that these commitments are carried out in full.

Slippery slope? No, it is a avalanche and we're in the face of it. If you let the Federal Government do this, it will be the end of the internet as you and I know it. What happens when the Feds find something they don't approve of on the internet? You think that child porn is the only thing? No political views would ever be suppressed? Hmm...

A New York man pleaded guilty to criminal copyright infringement for selling counterfeit goods over the internet. The man, Robert Cimino, 59, of Syracuse, NY, was charged with selling more than $250,000 worth of counterfeit goods over the internet. According to court documents, buyers would contact Cimino by email and then pay for the goods using Paypal.

Cimino would then mail infringing copies of Adobe, Autodesk, Intuit and Quark programs that he had burned to CD or DVD to the customers, including customers in the Eastern District of Virginia. Cimino admitted that from February 2006 to September 2009, he received at least $270,035 from his sales of infringing software products.

Don't get us wrong, we strongly support lowering copyright terms and a basic reform of the copyright system to strip out software from the mix. He was a criminal selling counterfeit goods. The people that purchased the software were mislead into believing that the software was legitimate.

Cimino is scheduled to be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Trenga on May 28, 2010. Cimino faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison, three years of supervised release, a $250,000 fine, restitution and forfeiture.

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Sixty five percent of adults feel they cannot live without Internet access, and even more - 71 percent - responded that it is important or very important to have Internet-enabled devices that can provide them with real-time updates on important issues including the state of the economy.

When asked to rate certain discretionary items on a scale of 1 (completely expendable) to 5 (cannot live without it), having Internet access ranks highest among the items listed, with 65 percent of U.S. adults reporting they cannot live without it. The following items and activities were ranked below Internet access in importance: cable television subscriptions (39 percent); dining out (20 percent); shopping for clothes (18 percent); and, gym membership (10 percent).

This confirmed what I personally believed to be true - that the Internet is essential, maybe even indispensible, especially during the current economic situation we're facing. But what really surprised me here was just how essential the Internet has become. More than half ranked the Internet as completely expendable over things like cable TV, dining out and even gym memberships! If asked, I suppose I'd also make the same choices.

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As part of the upgrade, all Fios customers will now have access to download speeds of 50 megabits per second and uploads of 20 Mbps for about $140 a month. The company is also offering its symmetrical 20 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload service to all Fios customers for $65 a month.

Verizon had already been offering these speeds in certain markets such as Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York. But now the service will be expanded to Verizon's entire Fios customer base, which is spread throughout its 16-state territory. Previously Fios in these states, such as Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, topped out at 30Mbps/15Mbps and 15Mbps/15Mbps.

Verizon will also upgrade its mid tier offering increasing speeds from 15Mbps/2Mbps to 20Mbps/5Mbps. And the low end service will increase from 5Mbps/2Mbps to 10Mbps/2Mbps.

It still figures that the government doesn't know how to stay away from technology it doesn't under. And PARENTS need to learn how to stop their kids from doing stuff they don't want them to do. It really isn't hard to say NO to your child. This new generation of parents are becoming so weak and so helpless that they are crying for the government to take control of their lives so they don't have to raise their own kids anymore. These laws take away freedoms we've had on the internet. Do not give government more power just because you can't do your job. You brought a new life into the world, you should take care of it.

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Lawmakers are seeking to address cyberbullying with new legislation because there's currently no specific law on the books that deals with it. A fairly new federal cyberstalking law might address such acts, according to Aftab, but no one has been prosecuted under it yet. The proposed federal law would make it illegal to use electronic means to "coerce, intimidate, harass or cause other substantial emotional distress."

When signed, the Missouri state law will update existing regulations on harassment and stalking to include instances of those acts over the Internet, text message, or other electronic device. It will make cyberbullying punishable by up to four years in jail.

So you can't get into debates anymore because someone's feelings might get hurt. It is pretty sad when this country has become a bunch of whiny, spineless sheep.

Here is an interesting report on how webpage sizes have increased in size over the years. ASE Labs is also a good example. I was always reluctant to ad features to the front page and such, but now it shows article images, Adnet content blocks, Prototype.js, and other stuff. The first version was straight HTML (no CSS even!). Times have changed.

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The size of the average web page has more than tripled since 2003. From 2003 to 2008 the average web page grew from 93.7K to over 312K (see Figure 1), some 233% (Domenech et al. 2007, Flinn & Betcher 2008). During the same five-year period, the number of objects in the average web page nearly doubled from 25.7 to 49.9 objects per page. Longer term statistics show that since 1995 the size of the average web page has increased by 22 times, and the number of objects per page has grown by 21.7 times.

It is pretty stupid that Comcast takes it upon itself to block bandwidth that customers pay for, but now they are intruding on services that really effect daily life. They are injecting packets for any sort of internet stream. Last Saturday, I couldn't get to my website for most of the day while other sites worked. I could ping aselabs.com and could not connect through SSH or HTTP. The server was fine, it was Comcast blocking the traffic.

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Recently, it has been observed that Comcast is disrupting TCP connections using forged TCP reset (RST) packets [1]. These reset packets were originally targeted at TCP connections associated with the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol. However, Comcast has stated that they are transitioning to a more "protocol neutral" traffic shaping approach [2]. We have recently observed this shift in policy, and have collected network traffic traces to demonstrate the behavior of their traffic shaping. In particular, we are able (during peak usage times) to synthetically generate a relatively large number of TCP reset packets aimed at any new TCP connection regardless of the application-level protocol. Surprisingly, this traffic shaping even disrupts normal web browsing and e-mail applications. Specifically, we observe two different types of packet forgery and packets being discarded.

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Bruce Tonkin recused himself from the discussion and dropped off the call during the discussion of items 5 & 6 due to potential conflict of interest. Kurt Pritz indicated that tasting is a practice that has grown over the years and that many recent discussions and writings demonstrate that the Board is already well versed on the related issues. Kurt indicated that ICANN has collected some information that a few parties have taken the practice to its logical conclusion, and operate exclusively on this model - deleting as much as 95.5% of names registered within the five-day grace period. Others exercise degrees of restraint. There are a spread percentage of names deleted in the grace period across all registrars that ranges from 0% to 99.5%. ICANN has had many discussions and consultations on this issue. It was proposed that ICANN charged a transaction fee on add-grace deletes in the 2004-2005 budget but there was substantial criticism that such a fee would be de-facto policy making by ICANN staff. Recently the GNSO voted to recommend that staff take action to change its transaction fee to change in for tasting deletes. If ICANN changed transaction fee in this manner, most think practice would cease. The vote represents Supporting Organization policy support for alternative budget.

If you were one of the many people getting hammered on Black Friday for web traffic, you caused this slow down. I'm one of them as well...

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A surge of e-commerce traffic on Thanksgiving night and all day Friday apparently caught several retail giants by surprise, with Lowe's, Macy's and Victoria's Secret especially hard hit. But they were far from the exception, as almost a third of leading retailers suffered significant slowdowns on Black Friday, according to statistics released this weekend by Keynote Competitive Research, a firm that tracks Web site performance.

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But the truth is that blanketing cities with Wi-Fi signals is not inherently a bad idea. Even though some projects have stalled or failed outright, there have also been several success stories. Cities such as Minneapolis, Minn.; Houston, Texas; Burbank, Calif.; and Tucson, Ariz., are moving forward and seeing early signs of success.

One of the common threads weaved through each of these deployments is that all of these cities have committed to using the Wi-Fi networks for their own purposes whether it be to provide remote access for mobile city workers, automate meter reading, control traffic congestion or enhance public safety.

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Mr. Roberts isn't the only networking pioneer dissatisfied with earlier achievements. Len Bosack, the 55-year-old co-founder and former chief technology officer of networking giant Cisco Systems Inc., helped commercialize routers, the core piece of networking equipment that allows computers to communicate with one another. Yet he now terms such gear "less and less adequate" for today's Internet needs. Last month, his company, XKL LLC, unveiled a system that allows businesses to connect to underground cables that have nearly 100 times the capacity of current telecommunications pipes. The actions of Messrs. Bosack and Roberts fuel the growing debate over whether the Internet's current infrastructure is sufficient to handle the explosion of bandwidth-hungry services such as Internet telephony and video. In a recent report, Cisco calculated that monthly Internet traffic in North America will increase 264% by 2011 to more than 7.8 million terabytes, or the equivalent of 40 trillion email messages. If such Internet traffic continues increasing, many believe networks could crash or at least slow to a crawl.

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The software maker is announcing Office Live Workspace, a free online tool for viewing, sharing and storing--but not editing--Office documents online. (It's existing Office Live efforts will be rebranded as Office Live Small Business.) It's not quite ready--starting Monday customers will be able to put in their name to be part of a beta testing program expected to begin later this year. Still, the effort is a recognition that competition is heating up in the productivity arena, an area that large rivals had basically ceded to Microsoft a few years ago. In addition to Google's effort, which as of earlier this month also includes presentation software, IBM announced its free Lotus Symphony productivity software, which prompted 100,000 downloads in its first week of availability.

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Wired News, with help from some readers, attempted to get real answers from the largest United States-based ISPs about what information they gather on their customers' use of the internet, and how long they retain records like IP addresses, e-mail and real-time browsing activity. Most importantly, we asked what they require from law-enforcement agencies before coughing up the data, and whether they sell your data to marketers. Only four of the eight largest ISPs responded to the 10-question survey, despite being contacted repeatedly over the course of two months. Some ISPs wouldn't talk to us, but gave answers to customers responding to a call for reader help on Wired's Threat Level blog.